Wargs and Wolves of Middle-earth: Wolf-riders, Werewolves and Carcharoth

Quick Answer: Wargs are the evil, intelligent wolves of Tolkien's Third Age. In The Hobbit they hold councils with the goblins and carry goblin wolf-riders; in The Lord of the Rings they hunt the Fellowship near Moria, and wolf-riders serve Saruman in Rohan. Behind them lies a darker First-Age story told in The Silmarillion: Sauron's werewolves at Tol-in-Gaurhoth, their sire Draugluin, the monstrous Carcharoth who bit off Beren's hand, and Huan, the hound of Valinor who defeated them both. In Sindarin a wolf is draug, a werewolf is gaur, and Gandalf's spell Naur dan i ngaurhoth! means "Fire against the werewolf-host".

Wolves are one of the oldest fears in European storytelling, and Tolkien, a philologist steeped in Norse and Old English literature, put them at the edges of every age of Middle-earth. They howl in the dark woods of Wilderland, they run at the side of goblins, and in the oldest tales they are not quite animals at all, but bodies housing evil spirits. This guide follows the wolves of Middle-earth from The Hobbit back to The Silmarillion, separates the books from Peter Jackson's films, and then looks at the attested Elvish words for wolf, werewolf and hound, so you can read Gandalf's battle-cry in its own language.

This post is part of our series on the peoples and creatures of Tolkien's world. For the full overview, start with the complete guide to the races of Middle-earth.

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What Is a Warg?

In Tolkien's usage a Warg is a particular kind of wolf: large, cunning, able to speak, and in league with the Enemy's servants. The word does not describe a separate species in the zoological sense. It names wolves that have chosen, or been bred for, evil.

The name itself was borrowed rather than invented. Old Norse vargr meant "wolf" and also "outlaw", and the Old English cognate wearg meant a criminal or accursed one. Tolkien, who taught Old English and Old Norse at Oxford, gave the word a new life as the name of a wolf-people of Middle-earth. Like orc (from Old English orc, a demon) and ent (from Old English ent, a giant), warg sits in the English-language layer of his invented world: these are the words his "translation" of the Red Book uses, not Elvish names.

That point matters for readers who want Elvish: Tolkien never gives a separate Elvish word that means "Warg" specifically. The Elves had words for wolves and for werewolves, which we will meet below, but "Warg" is the English-language name in the books. If you are after vocabulary for the wider family of creatures, our post on the Elvish word for wolf and dragon collects more terms, though be aware that some glosses in older versions of that post need correcting (we follow the dictionary data described in the Elvish section below).

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Wargs in The Hobbit

Readers first meet Wargs in chapter 6 of The Hobbit, "Out of the Frying-Pan into the Fire". Bilbo, Gandalf and the dwarves have just escaped the goblins of the Misty Mountains. As night falls on the eastern slopes, they hear howling, and the party scrambles up the trees of a clearing just before the wolves arrive.

The clearing turns out to be a Warg meeting-place. Tolkien makes several points about Wargs in this scene that shape everything later:

• They have a language. Gandalf understands it; the narrator calls it the dreadful language of the Wargs. Tolkien gives us no words of it.
• They plan with the goblins. The Wargs had arranged to meet goblins that night for a raid on the villages of Men who had been moving into the woodland. The goblins would ride the wolves, and the wolves would share the plunder.
• They are afraid of fire. Gandalf sets pine-cones alight with spells and hurls them down, scattering the pack and setting the clearing ablaze.

The trees catch fire, the goblins arrive and dance round the burning trunks, and the company is saved only when the Great Eagles swoop down and carry them off. That rescue is the subject of a separate post on the Great Eagles of Middle-earth.

Wolf-riders at the Battle of Five Armies

Wargs return at the climax of The Hobbit. When Bolg leads the goblins of the north against Erebor, the Wargs come with them, and wolf-riders fight among the goblin host. The Battle of Five Armies is in fact named for its five sides: Elves, Men and Dwarves on one side, goblins and Wild Wolves on the other. Tolkien counts the wolves as an army of their own, not merely as mounts.

This gives Wargs an unusual status. Most creatures in the books are servants or beasts. The Wargs are allies, with their own grudges and their own share of the spoils. That is part of what makes them unsettling: they are not dumb animals driven by hunger but participants in a war.

If you want more on the early chapters of the book, our guide to the Hobbit riddle game covers the scene that comes just before the Warg clearing, and The Hobbit films and their Elvish covers Thranduil's people, who fought against the wolves at the Lonely Mountain.

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Wolves in The Lord of the Rings

The attack in Hollin

The most famous wolf episode in The Lord of the Rings comes in Book II, chapter 4, "A Journey in the Dark". Having failed to cross Caradhras, the Fellowship turns back toward Moria. At night a great pack surrounds their camp on a hill in Hollin.

Aragorn and Gandalf both recognise that these are no ordinary beasts. When the leader of the pack approaches, Gandalf speaks to him and Legolas shoots him. The pack attacks, and Gandalf, holding a burning brand, cries out in Sindarin:

Naur an edraith ammen! Naur dan i ngaurhoth!

He had used the first half earlier on Caradhras to light a fire in the snow. The second half is new: a direct address to the attackers. The trees burst into flame, the wolves are routed, and the company survives the night.

The detail that settles the matter comes in the morning. There are no bodies. The only traces of the fight are the charred brands and Legolas's arrows lying on the hillside. Whatever the wolves were, they did not die as ordinary animals die. Tolkien never states outright what they were, but the word Gandalf chose, gaurhoth, "werewolf-host", points back to the First Age and to Sauron's oldest servants. We return to that phrase in the Elvish section.

The wolf-riders of Isengard

In The Two Towers the wolves fight for Saruman. The Riders of Rohan report Orcs riding wolves among Isengard's forces, and wolf-riders take part in the fighting at the Fords of Isen and in the campaign that ends at Helm's Deep. After the battle the wolves come down at night to feed on the dead, a grim detail that reminds the reader what kind of creatures these are.

Note what the books do not contain: there is no warg ambush on the road from Edoras to Helm's Deep, and Aragorn does not fall off a cliff. Both are film inventions, discussed below.

Saruman's use of wolves fits his broader character. He breeds and gathers whatever servants are to hand, from the Uruk-hai to the Dunlendings, and wolves are simply another weapon. Our post on the Uruk-hai covers his other creations, and orcs and goblins of Middle-earth covers the riders themselves.

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Sauron's Werewolves: Tol-in-Gaurhoth

To understand why Gandalf called the Hollin wolves a werewolf-host, you have to go back to The Silmarillion, chapter 19, "Of Beren and Lúthien".

In the First Age, Sauron served Morgoth as his greatest lieutenant. After the Dagor Bragollach, the Battle of Sudden Flame, Sauron assaulted the elven tower of Minas Tirith on the island of Tol Sirion, which Finrod Felagund had built and his brother Orodreth held. Sauron took it and made it his own stronghold.

The island was renamed Tol-in-Gaurhoth, the Isle of Werewolves. Tol here is the Sindarin word for an island, as in Tol Eressëa; in is the plural article; gaurhoth is the werewolf-host. Sauron filled the place with wolves and with worse, and The Silmarillion describes these werewolves as fell beasts inhabited by dreadful spirits that he had imprisoned in their bodies. That is the key distinction between a Tolkien werewolf and a folklore werewolf. There is no human who changes shape under a full moon. A Tolkien werewolf is a wolf-body housing an evil spirit.

The death of Finrod

The darkest scene at Tol-in-Gaurhoth is the death of Finrod Felagund. Finrod accompanied Beren on his quest for a Silmaril, disguised as an Orc, but Sauron saw through the disguise in a famous contest of songs of power. Finrod, Beren and their companions were thrown into the pits beneath the tower. One by one, a werewolf came and devoured the companions. When the wolf came for Beren, Finrod broke his bonds and wrestled the beast to death with his hands and teeth, and died of his wounds. It is one of the great sacrifices of the legendarium, and it was a werewolf of Sauron that caused it.

Draugluin, sire of werewolves

Sauron's chief wolf was Draugluin, whom The Silmarillion calls the sire of the werewolves of Angband. His name contains the Sindarin elements draug, "wolf", and luin, "blue", and it is usually read as "blue wolf", a reference perhaps to his grey-blue pelt. Treat that as the standard reading of the elements rather than a meaning Tolkien explains at length.

Draugluin met his match in Huan, the hound of Valinor, who came to the island with Lúthien. Sauron sent wolf after wolf across the bridge, and Huan killed them all; then Draugluin himself came, and Huan slew him too, though Draugluin escaped back to Sauron long enough to tell him of the hound before he died.

Sauron as a werewolf

Then Sauron came himself, in the form of a werewolf, the greatest that had yet walked the world. This is one of the very few moments in Tolkien's writings where Sauron takes the shape of a beast, and it fails. Huan seized him by the throat, and no shape-shifting could free him. Lúthien forced Sauron to yield the tower to her, and he fled as a vampire-shape into the forest of Taur-nu-Fuin. The spells that held the island were broken, the prisoners were freed, and Beren was found mourning beside Finrod's body.

The episode also explains the disguise that follows. Beren and Lúthien take the fells, the skins, of Draugluin and of Thuringwethil, Sauron's bat-winged messenger, and in those shapes they travel to the gates of Angband itself.

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Carcharoth, the Red Maw

Morgoth knew a prophecy about Huan: the hound would be slain only by the mightiest wolf that ever lived. So Morgoth set out to breed that wolf. He chose a whelp of Draugluin's line, fed it with his own hand on living flesh, and filled it with his power. The result was Carcharoth, called in The Silmarillion the Red Maw, and also Anfauglir, the Jaws of Thirst. He lay at the gates of Angband, sleepless, as their guardian.

The element carch in his name is the Sindarin word for "fang", which suits the creature; a full breakdown of the rest of the name is less certain, so we stay with the Silmarillion's own translation, Red Maw.

The hand and the Silmaril

When Beren and Lúthien came to Angband in the shape of Draugluin, Carcharoth was suspicious, and Lúthien cast him into sleep. They passed into Morgoth's throne-room, where Lúthien sang Morgoth himself to sleep, and Beren cut a Silmaril from the Iron Crown with the knife Angrist.

On the way out, Carcharoth woke. Beren held out the Silmaril to drive him back, since the holy jewel burned anything evil that touched it. Carcharoth bit off Beren's hand, Silmaril and all. The jewel burned him from within, and in agony the wolf fled south, maddened, through the lands of the Elves.

From this comes Beren's later name, Erchamion, the One-handed.

The Hunting of the Wolf

Carcharoth broke into Doriath, the hidden kingdom of Thingol, where the girdle of Melian could not stop him. Thingol, Beren, Beleg and Mablung set out with Huan in the Hunting of the Wolf. Carcharoth wounded Beren mortally. Huan fought him, and the prophecy was fulfilled: the two slew each other. Mablung cut open the wolf's belly and found Beren's hand still clutching the Silmaril, unconsumed.

Beren died in Lúthien's arms soon after, and the story moves on to Lúthien's choice of mortality. It is the core tale of the legendarium, and two wolves, Draugluin and Carcharoth, stand at its turning points. For other Elvish lines from the books, our collection of Lord of the Rings Elvish phrases collects phrases from the books that echo the tale.

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Huan, Hound of Valinor

Huan deserves his own section, because he is the one great canine hero of Tolkien's world.

Huan was a hound of Valinor, given by Oromë the Hunter to Celegorm, one of the sons of Fëanor. He never slept, could not be tricked, and was bound by a doom that he would fall only to the mightiest wolf. He was also permitted to speak in words three times before his death. He spoke first to counsel Lúthien, a second time to guide her and Beren, and the third time as he lay dying after the Hunting of the Wolf, to say farewell to Beren.

Huan turned against his master Celegorm when Celegorm and his brother Curufin betrayed Lúthien, and from then on he served her. In a story full of treacherous Elves and enslaved Men, the faithful hound is one of its brightest figures.

The Sindarin word huan means "great dog, hound", so his name is effectively "Hound". Tolkien gives the faithful dog the plainest of names, while the wolves of Angband get grim compound names; the contrast is part of the storytelling.

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Wargs in the Films: What Peter Jackson Changed

Peter Jackson's films brought the Wargs vividly to life, but they changed them in several ways. Here is what is film-only:

• The design. The film Wargs of The Two Towers are huge, heavy-shouldered, hyena-like beasts. Tolkien's Wargs are wolves. The Hobbit films moved the design back toward wolves, but kept them far larger than any natural animal.
• The ambush on the road to Helm's Deep. In The Two Towers film, Saruman sends wolf-riders against the refugees of Edoras, and Aragorn is dragged over a cliff by a Warg. None of this is in the book.
• Azog and the white warg. In the Hobbit films, Azog the Defiler hunts Thorin from the back of a white Warg. In Tolkien's writing, Azog was killed by Dáin Ironfoot at the Battle of Azanulbizar, long before The Hobbit begins; it is his son Bolg who leads the goblins at the Battle of Five Armies.
• The Warg clearing. The Hobbit film's version of chapter 6 has the company clinging to pine trees that topple over a cliff edge; the dramatic collapse is film-only, though Gandalf's burning pine-cones and the Eagles' rescue come straight from the book.

What the films kept well is the alliance between wolves and goblins, the image of wolf-riders as cavalry for the Enemy, and the sense that these are intelligent, malicious creatures rather than animals.

For more on how the films handled Tolkien's languages, see our guide to what language the Elves speak in Lord of the Rings.

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Wolves and the Wider Bestiary

Wolves sit within a larger family of Enemy-aligned creatures, and comparing them helps place them:

The same pattern runs through other creatures in this series. Morgoth's greatest servants were spirits wearing monstrous shapes, like the Balrogs; his most terrible beasts were bred, like the dragons; and the darkest powers of the world's first ages leave descendants that still haunt the Third Age, as with the giant spiders descended from Ungoliant. The wolves follow the same arc: from the spirit-filled werewolves of Tol-in-Gaurhoth to the Wargs of Wilderland.

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Wolves and Werewolves in Elvish

Tolkien gave the Elves a rich vocabulary for wolves, and it is precise: the Elves distinguished an ordinary wolf from a werewolf. All the words below are attested in Tolkien's writings and listed in our Elvish dictionary data.

A few notes on using these words correctly:

• Do not use nauro for a plain wolf. It means werewolf. For an ordinary wolf in Quenya, use narmo. In Sindarin, draug and garaf both mean wolf, and gaur is the werewolf.
• Draugluin combines draug "wolf" with luin "blue", the same luin as in Ered Luin, the Blue Mountains.
• Gaurhoth is gaur "werewolf" + hoth "host, horde". Tol-in-Gaurhoth is the Isle of the Werewolf-host.

Reading "Naur dan i ngaurhoth"

Gandalf's cry breaks down cleanly:

• Naur — "fire"
• dan — "against" (its range of meaning includes "back in return against")
• i — "the"
• ngaurhoth — gaurhoth "werewolf-host", with its first consonant changed by the article

That last change is Sindarin mutation. After the article i, a word beginning with g takes a nasal form, so gaurhoth becomes ngaurhoth. Mutation is one of the features that makes Sindarin sound so distinctive, and it is one of the first things a learner meets. The full line means "Fire against the werewolf-host!", paired with Naur an edraith ammen!, "Fire for our saving!", which uses edraith, "rescue, saving".

If you want to understand mutations and the other sound rules behind spells like this one, our free Elvish lessons build up Sindarin pronunciation and grammar step by step. For background on the two languages, see Quenya vs Sindarin and the complete guide to Tolkien's Elvish languages.

Writing the words in Tengwar

The Elves wrote with the Tengwar, and you can see any of these words in Elvish script. Type draug or Huan into our Tengwar name tool to see it in Fëanor's letters, or practise drawing the letters by hand with the Tengwar Scribe. Our Tengwar alphabet guide explains how the letters are built. And if you want to try turning your own phrase about wolves into Elvish, the English to Elvish translator works from attested Quenya and Sindarin vocabulary.

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Why Tolkien Wrote Wolves This Way

Tolkien's wolves draw on two traditions he knew intimately.

The first is Norse myth, where wolves are agents of the end of the world. Fenrir, bound by the gods, will break free at Ragnarök; the wolves Sköll and Hati chase the sun and moon. Morgoth breeding Carcharoth to fulfil a prophecy about a single hound, and feeding him with his own hand, has the feel of that mythic world, where the great wolf is a weapon aimed at the gods' own champions.

The second is Old English and medieval literature, where the wolf is the beast of battle that follows armies to feed on the slain. The image of wolves coming down on the dead after Helm's Deep is straight from that tradition, as is the borrowed word warg itself.

What Tolkien added was the moral and theological framework of his own world. Evil in Middle-earth cannot create, only corrupt and mimic. Wargs are wolves corrupted; werewolves are wolf-bodies hijacked by enslaved spirits. Even Morgoth's masterpiece, Carcharoth, is a bred and twisted animal, not a new creation. The Silmaril burning him from within is a precise image of that idea: holiness destroys the evil thing that tries to swallow it.

This also explains why the faithful hound wins. Huan is a creature of Valinor, given by Oromë; he is the uncorrupted version of what the wolves have become. The clash between Huan and the wolves is a clash between the world as it was meant to be and the world as Morgoth bent it.

For the related figure who answered the wolves with fire, see our post on Gandalf's Elvish name Mithrandir, and for the order he belonged to, the Istari, the wizards of Middle-earth.

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People Also Ask

Are Wargs evil? Yes. In both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Wargs are allied with goblins and serve the Enemy's purposes. They are intelligent wolves who raid, plunder and hunt the free peoples.

Can Wargs talk? In The Hobbit they have their own language, which Gandalf understands. Tolkien never records any of its words.

Who killed Carcharoth? Huan, the hound of Valinor, during the Hunting of the Wolf in Doriath. The two killed each other, fulfilling the prophecy that Huan would fall only to the mightiest wolf.

What is the Elvish word for wolf? In Sindarin, draug or garaf; in Quenya, narmo. For a werewolf, Sindarin uses gaur and Quenya nauro.

Were the wolves in Hollin werewolves? Tolkien does not say outright, but Gandalf calls them a werewolf-host, and in the morning there were no bodies, only arrows and brands on the ground.

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Learn the Language Gandalf Used Against the Wolves

When the wolves closed in at Hollin, Gandalf did not shout in Westron. He answered them in Sindarin, the tongue of the Grey-elves, with a fire-spell built from real words and real grammar. That is the joy of Tolkien's languages: they are not decoration but working systems, consistent enough to read line by line.

Learn Elvish free, starting today. Our course gives you 10 free lessons in Quenya and Sindarin, covering pronunciation, the core vocabulary of the books, and the grammar behind lines like Naur dan i ngaurhoth. Start the free Elvish lessons, then try the translator and see your name written in Tengwar.

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Related Reading

• Races of Middle-earth: The Complete Guide
• Orcs and Goblins of Middle-earth
• The Uruk-hai Explained
• Great Eagles of Middle-earth
• Dragons of Middle-earth
• Balrogs of Middle-earth
• Giant Spiders of Middle-earth
• Elvish Words for Wolf and Dragon
• Black Speech Words: Orkish Vocabulary
• Elvish Dictionary: Common Words